THE FICKLE FINGER OF FOOTBALL

Football is the most straightforward of sports.
Crash, smash, score. Or not.

There is no irony in football. There is irony in
politics, extreme irony. Otherwise, how could a
presidential election have hinged on the hieroglyphic
reading of hanging chad?

This weekend politics in all its irony will be
horning in on football. Send the University of Delaware
team to Iowa, and what pops out is Joe Biden.

The UD is Biden's alma mater, class of '65. Iowa is
Disneyland for politicians.

There could be no sweeter meeting for Biden than the
UD playing the University of Northern Iowa on Saturday
in the NCAA Division I-AA quarterfinals in Iowa, about a
month before the Iowa caucuses open up the presidential
nominating season on Jan. 3.

Of all the presidential candidates, Biden's fellow
Democrats or the Republicans, the six-term senator from
Delaware is the only one who can lay claim to the game.
With his poll numbers as modest as they are in Iowa, he
is taking what he can get.

Biden had an appearance Tuesday at the Northern Iowa
campus in Cedar Falls. In an account by the
Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, he took a line he often
uses quite seriously -- about reasons for losing
elections -- and turned it into a jest about his
allegiance to the UD in the game.

"Unlike other presidential candidates, I have no
trouble knowing who I'm for. Some things are worth
losing elections over," Biden joked.

Unless schedules change, Biden will be the lone
member of Delaware officialdom amid all the Iowans at
the game. Gov. Ruth Ann Minner is not going. Nor are
Sen. Tom Carper or Rep. Mike Castle or other statewide
officeholders. Biden's son-the-attorney-general has
National Guard duty, but he will be rooting for the
Fightin' Blue Hens against top-seeded Northern Iowa and
for his outnumbered father.

"I think it's going to be the first of two wins for
Delaware. First football, then doing well in the
caucuses. It will not be the first time we've come from
behind," Beau Biden quipped.

When the first round of playoffs was held last week,
politically speaking Joe Biden could not lose. Either
the UD or Delaware State University would advance from
one game, and either Northern Iowa or the University of
New Hampshire from the other. If the next stop did not
include a team from the state with the first
presidential caucuses, it would have a team from the
state with the first presidential primary.

Political irony had its day. With those four teams,
it was win-win-win-win for Biden. The bracket-makers
could not have been better to him if he had bribed them.

Still, UD-Northern Iowa is a second-tier contest, and
Biden is a second-tier candidate. When John Kerry was
running for president, he got to watch his hometown
Boston Red Sox in a baseball game with the New York
Yankees. Kerry got national exposure out of it.

What Biden will get out of the football game is no
doubt more of the usual -- national neglect.